India. is predominantly and temperamentally a religious country. Its
religious fervour, its love of the abstract, its subtlising attitude and
philosophical propensities are proverbial. It is so deeply engrossed in
religion and it has so marvellously identified itself with it that Professor
Max Muller had to observe in one of his writings that "India eats,
drinks, sleeps, thinks, and acts religion," This means that in every
walk of life Indias has invested itself with religion. In fact, India
made it a paramount project of life and it is on account of this that
whatever is beneficial to humanity for its political, social and economic
well-being is considered as a religious duty. Vegetarianism in India,
therefore, has this background.

The East is reputed to be the cradle of all religions chiefly because
India had the good fortune of acting as Godmother to various religions
of the world and lent them its best.

The ancient Indian Incarnations, Rishis and Sages, whose keen insight,
clear outlook, deep love, and incessant meditations, conceived codes and
interpreted the laws of working of the Soul and its salvation expounded
the unity and essence of life in the external diversity and multiplicity.
They gave a vision to the nation and as a nation with vision does not
perish so it has not perished yet. It should, however, be admitted that
it had dwindled and deteriorated to some extent due to the contacts with
foreign powers and their conflicting cultures, yet it has held its own.
Its survival against onslaughts of foreign powers and foreign ideologies
is principally due to its spirituality.

India's Rishis taught the unity of life for the entire animal creation.
Those Seers also discovered the indispensability of animals and plants
to mankind and consequently both from higher motives of religion, spiritual
growth. as well as practical purposes of life, they fore-sightedly preached
the Gospel of the highest biological truth of interrelation between man
and members of other kingdoms. Thus judged from the cultural and utilitarian
points alike, the spiritual code of Aryan life that they have evolved
is so sound and sublime that they have combined the good and the true
with the beautiful, the secular with the non-secular, culture with use
and service, by wedding the spiritual to the material.

India is a land of distances. India is a land of villages. It is a land
of over-abundant population. It is preeminently an agricultural country.
The ancient Aryan Indian religion was for formulated on the basis of cosmology
or spiritual economics. It could not ignore the geo-economics of the land
as they moulded religion in the cast of agriculture. Agriculture connotes
draft. Beast is superior to man in point of draft. The ox was found most
suitable for the purpose and climate and the female could be tapped for
the milk. The animals whose male yielded food from fields and the females
yielded luscious lacto-products and whose fluid and excreta (urine and
dung) yielded fertility to the soil must naturally bear the palm.

The Cow is thus raised to the status of the Mother and the Bull that
of the Father. It is also deified in Vedic and post-Vedic literature and
enjoys n sacrosanct character, both as a symbol of animal life and pivot
of agronomy. It fed the land with its manure and man with its lacto-products,
the only source of getting nourishing food for a majority of Indians who
are vegetarians as well as for non-vegetarians in a tropical country like
India.

Thus the cycle of Tapa-Bhoga-Yagna is kept in motion. Animal fed the
land and man, man in his turn fed the animal, and, in the alternative
cycle. land paid its tribute to plant, plant to animal, and animal to
man.

Looking back to the history of various nations we find among the ancient
Greek philosophers strong advocates of vegetarianism in Pythagoras, Plato,
Socrates and others. In India, too, this problem of vegetarianism was
solved much earlier by the Aryan philosophers, who in many of their writings,
advanced logical and scientific reasons against killing of animals and
eating flesh foods. There is a common belief among many historians and
oriental scholars that the Western countries owed their ideas regarding
vegetarianism to Aryan philosophers, who from pre-historic times have
advocated and practised a strict vegetarian diet. India is the only country
in the world where vegetarianism has prevailed for centuries among the
vast majority of the people. The Hindus were the first nation in the world
who understood the fundamental principles of the vegetarian theory. It
was from the Hindus that other nations such as the Chinese, Japanese,
Tibetans, Siamese, Burmese, Cantonese, and Persians became impressed with
the idea that slaughter of animals for food is cruel, inhuman and wicked.
The greatest thinkers of ancient India gave arguments in support of vegetarianism
from considerations of health, physiological structure, chemical properties
of food, and moral and spiritual ideals.

Physicians in India also do not consider flesh-foods as conducive to
health. They believe that even the flesh of animals specially fed and
fattened for meat is diseased in the majority of cases and the germs of
various diseases are introduced into the human body. They further assert
that all flesh being a production of nutrition contains some refuse matter,
because its elimination is suddenly arrested by slaughter. Such refuse
is intensely poisonous and contains creatine and is a source of many diseases.
animal flesh produces unnatural heat in the system and causes unusual
activity and restlessness leading to nervous debility. Use of meat also
increases the action of the heart and creates heart trouble. The views
of physicians of India are endorsed by physiologists and comparative anatomists
of the west, who have proved from the structure of the teeth. stomach,
alimentary canal, the microscopic blood corpuscles, and the digestive
processes that man is by nature a frugivorous animal.

In ancient times when agriculture was unknown, men lived on fruits, nuts,
and other vegetable products which were found in abundance. But when the
struggle for existence, which is so strongly manifested in the animal
kingdom. became more difficult, people had to live on whatever they found
around them. The savage tribes who still did not know anything about agriculture
still lived on wild animals, birds, and even reptiles. Some of them even
became cannibals when, they could not procure enough meat of wild animals.
Can this signify that flesh and animal flesh are the natural food of man?
No! it remains unnatural though it might be a diet in adversity and a
relic of barbarity. A man can eat anything unnatural with the help of
cookery and artificial food dressing but this cannot change the frugivorons
nature of man.

The majority of people in India are lacto-vegetarians, some out of religious
and ethical considerations, some by tradition and others for economic
reasons. Vegetarians in India get their fat requirements from milk and
dairy products, as they do not take eggs. For herbivorous animals mammal's
milk is a natural. perfect food. From infancy babies who have no teeth
or knowledge of eating grow on mother's milk only, physically and mentally.
Thus milk is the natural food created for man when mother's milk ceased
to be available. Cows' milk is used as being next to mothers' milk in
dietetic values.

The cow in India is considered to be the Foster-Mother of mankind and
s treated as a member of the human family. With a view to getting better
and more milk, cows are given concentrates and are developed to give more
milk. Additional milk produced by the cow after suckling her calf is used
by mankind and is considered to be a natural and humane food. I am a unique
example of a man sustained by 3lbs. of cow's milk only with frequent additions
of vegetables and fruits. I think I am a challenge to the modern science
of dietaries which worries about calories and vitamins. I think I get
all of them from cows' milk.

This motherly regard and reverence for the cow in India as Gandhiji remarked,
is the unique contribution of Hinduism, based on the principle of the
oneness of life, to the evolution of the unity of life.

The younger generation in India was taught to be kind to animals and
to refrain from killing or harming any creature. Hence an Indian devoted
to his culture believes from his early childhood that killing for food
is sinful. To the Western people this conception of sin in killing may
not appeal as they are taught to believe that animals have no soul, no
mind and no feelings. But this is a mistaken notion. The Hindu religion,
including Vedic religion, Buddhism and Jainism is based on the fundamental
principle of the evolution of man. It teaches one that life is manifesting
in various forms of mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdom, and that all
are linked together by a mighty chain of evolution. Wherever there is
life there is the manifestation of cosmic mind, the difference being in
the degree in the degree of such manifestation. Even the advanced scientists
of modern times support this view.

Vedic religion forbids killing of animals. Buddhism and Jainism have
Ahimsa, non-killing, as their basic principle. The Jains in India have
greatly popularized this principle and have contributes much for its vindication.
It is often argued by the advocates of animal food that in the economy
of nature the struggle for existence demands that one animal shall live
upon another. This may be true for lower animals, but man, the superior
animal, is governed by moral and spiritual laws and has a higher aim of
life. Man has to subdue his animal propensities by moral and spiritual
laws and has to raise himself to the highest plane of spiritual enlightenment.
Many sages and seers in India have attained spiritual enlightenment by
abiding by the moral and spiritual laws and remaining non-violent in thought
and action, and there are many philosophers and leaders of thought like
Mahatma Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, and various religious
heads who move on a higher spiritual level with a vegetarian diet. So
also there are many brave and courageous races like the Sikhs and others
who, though living mainly on a vegetarian diet, are none the less brave.

In spite of such testimony throughout the centuries, nations of the world
have gone against the laws of nature and have gone against the laws of
nature and have finally produced a world in which no matter how hard they
drudge nor how much ingenuity they use, they remain the prey of war, want,
disease, ignorance, and early death, the final flavour of this so-called
civilization being the constant threat of wholesale annihilation by atom
bombs.

Let us, however, remember that God created a world in which neither want
war, nor disease need exist. All these are man-made. If only mankind lives
according to the natural law all these evils would stop and there would
be radiant health, long life and bounty for all creatures and for man
there would be a rich experience of that glorious superhuman consciousness
and achievement which is his special privilege and goal of life.

The question model naturally arise as to how to revert to a natural way
of life. If only we realize the truth of what we are, and realize the
alternative way of life, assess successive steps to free ourselves from
an unnatural and complex mode of life, and begin to take them, we call
build a new and harmless world civilization.

But ambitious man, entangled in the passion of his senses, has plunged
his living against the laws of nature and goes on increasing his desires
and needs, and has become a ruthless exploiter of nature, creating problems
of ill health, soil erosion etc., having its repercussions on drought,
floods, pests, and pestilence. He has upset nature's plan by tending large
herds for meat and breaking the cycle of land, animal, and man-reducing
the world of plenty to one of want and semi-starvation. Economically also
the flesh-eathg way of life is extravagant, demanding 16 times more land
than the vegetarian way of life, which looking from the point of view
of the world's food problem, is going to be a serious menace to the principle
of co-existence.

Man has further developed a materialistic turn of mind and abdicated
life under natural environments and preferred urban life with ever-worsening
conditions.

Let us once again realize that man is potentially an expression of Divine
Creativity. He has the power of unlimited mental expansion and realization.
Let him utilize this rare opportunity to reach the goal and act as representative
of the Creator's purpose and guardian to the kingdom of nature and thus
be a fore-runner of a new humanitarian world civilization.

It is a happy augury of the new era that eminent scientists, dieticians,
and representatives of national vegetarian and humanitarian institutions
of the world are sitting together to consider these problems and plan
co-ordinated action under the International Vegetarian Union. Let us all
set aside our personal or national differences and prejudices and strengthen
this august world body financially and spiritually.

It is a happy thing that history repeats itself inasmuch as this World
Vegetarian Congress is held at Paris where as early as in 1918 the Inter-allied
Conference held at Paris appointed the international commission of expert
scientific authorities to consider food problems of Entente nations consisting
of Prof. Gley and Langlois (France), Bolazzi and Pagliani (Italy), Hulot
(Belgium), Chilterden and Lusk (United States) who passed the undermentioned
resolution at their meeting in Rome on April 29th, 1918 . . .

"The Commission has decided tha it is not desirable to fix the minimum
meat ration in view of the fact that no absolute need exists for meat,
since the proteins meat can be replaced by proteins of animal origin such
as contained in milk and cheese etc., as well as by the proteins of the
vegetable kingdom."

Let the I.V.U. approach F.A.O. Experts of Nutrition to appoint a commission
of expert scientists to go into the question again and advise various
nations and govenments to plan the substitution of flesh foods by vegetarian
diet gradually in all countries.

The I.V.U. should also approach Ministry of Health to get exemption from
vaccination etc., for vegetarians and conscientious objectors, and also
approach various universities to make provision for vegetarian diet to
vegetarian students.

While expressing our thanks to I.V.U. for deciding to hold 15th World
Vegetarian Congress at Bombay (India), in 1957, I assure them on my behalf
and on behalf of all humanitarian organisatins in India that we will do
all in our power to organise the Congress in a dignified manner in testimony
whereof submit the voluminous support promised to us by the Humanitarians
in India printed in the booklet. Finally I extend our cordial invitation
to you all and the humanitarians of the world to attend the 15th World
Vegetarian Congress at Bombay.